Andrei Tarkovsky - People Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

View all Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes
I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

Andrei Tarkovsky
[About Mirror] I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself.

Andrei Tarkovsky
It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Time is such a simple, almost primitive idea. It is just a means of material differentiation, a way of uniting us all; for in our external, material lives we value the synchronized efforts of individual people.

Andrei Tarkovsky
A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

Andrei Tarkovsky
If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? they have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common. [...] If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money

Andrei Tarkovsky
I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky